Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (96 page)

The president went on ABC for an interview with Barbara Walters, a rite of passage for public officials wanting to express public contrition. Yet it may have been the oddest nonapology in American political history: “I think it's true that
when Mr. Reagan says that I'm desperate or hysterical or vindictive that he shares part of the blame that I have assumed.”
⁴⁹
Carter explained away some of his overheated rhetoric by saying, “It's not a deliberate thing. Some of the issues are just burning with fervor in my mind and in my heart, and I have to sometimes speak extemporaneously and I have gotten carried away on a couple of occasions.”
⁵⁰
The president did tell Walters that he wanted to get his campaign “back on the track” and that he should not have implied that Reagan was a warmonger.
⁵¹
Going forward, he said, he would tone down his attacks on Reagan and instead give a series of long, issues-oriented speeches.

When told about Carter's “apology,” the Gipper replied, “Well, I think that would be nice if he did … if he's decided to straighten up and fly right.”
⁵²

Despite Carter's promise to clean up his act, Anderson was unmoved. He told liberals in New York that the president was “incompetent,” that he had “no clear and compelling vision of our nation's future,” and that Carter was simply an “opportunist” who craved power.
⁵³

Carter's quasi mea culpa seemed too little and certainly came too late. He was still forced to address the issue on the campaign trail. During a swing through the South he acknowledged before a large crowd that he'd been “overly enthusiastic” in his comments about Reagan. During a town hall meeting with 4,400 people at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, Carter was taken aback when a high-school student came full bore at him, asking, “Sir, why is it that if you are the right man for the job, that you and your staff have to lower yourself to the extent of slinging mud and making slanderous statements [against] your rival, Ronald Reagan?” The hall exploded in applause at the young man's brazenness.
⁵⁴

In his postpresidential memoir, Carter did not express much regret at having directed “a harsh phrase” at Reagan. The media, he wrote, had misinterpreted his attacks on Reagan as being “personal.” What really bothered Carter was that the “political damage” from the attacks “was afflicting me as much as it was him.”
⁵⁵

R
EAGAN HAD BEGUN INCHING
toward the middle. First he had softened his position on the bailout of Chrysler and on federal aid to New York City, causing conservatives to squawk. Now, during yet another tour of Ohio, a battleground state, his campaign distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers in which he reversed his earlier stance on subjecting unions to antitrust laws.
⁵⁶

Unexpectedly, Reagan also called on the government to speed up the purchase of cars from Detroit as a means of helping the ailing industry. The Carter White House was livid, believing that Republican moles had found out that Carter was going to take just this action. Reagan had stolen the president's thunder.
⁵⁷

Moderates in the campaign even tried to convince Reagan to give up on his tax-cut plan and to drop his support for eliminating the Departments of Education and Energy, but on these and other issues, his position was unshakable.

The campaign's sudden moderation reflected how close the race was in vital swing states. Reagan had picked up his share of protesters and picketers on the campaign trail, in part because his operation continued to have problems with the local advance work. The protests became an outsized problem for the Reagan campaign because the media often highlighted boos or heckling. During his latest Ohio tour, for example, hecklers came out to a poorly advanced event in Steubenville, and the
New York Times
duly noted their presence in its news report.
⁵⁸
The focus on the protesters detracted from Reagan's message. In this case the candidate was calling for a close examination of the Clean Air Act, which he claimed had closed many factories in the Buckeye State.
⁵⁹
Ohio, where unemployment had approached 9 percent, was the rustiest of all the Rust Belt; from Akron to Zuck, factories were boarded up.
⁶⁰
Reagan knew that Ohio was crucial for him. Carter had carried the state by only a handful of votes in 1976, and in the twentieth century, no Republican had won the presidency without carrying Ohio.

The Reagan campaign enlisted Bush to make the case in battleground states. Once relegated to the backwaters, Bush was now put in a series of television broadcasts modeled on his effective “Ask George Bush” formats from the primaries, only these were billed as “Ask Reagan/Bush.” The shows were broadcast all over the northeast and Midwest along with Texas. Stu Spencer told reporter Lisa Myers, whom the
Washington Star
had promoted to the Reagan plane, that Bush would be especially helpful in American suburbs.
⁶¹

Bush's prominent role in the campaign was a surprising break from GOP precedent. Ford had tried to muzzle his running mate, Bob Dole, and Nixon had put a leash on his rabid dog, Spiro Agnew. Nixon himself was ground under Eisenhower's heel for eight years. Bush, however, benefited because Reagan was growing more comfortable with him and because some of Bush's staff had emerged in key positions in the campaign, especially Jim Baker.

Another Reagan effort to reach beyond conservative voters—his courting of traditionally Democratic groups—was paying off. A month earlier, the National Maritime Union had strongly denounced Reagan in its newsletter. But Reagan attended a meeting of the union in St. Louis, and by voice vote the seamen changed course, endorsing the GOP nominee for president.
⁶²
Reagan himself seemed stunned at the development.

Almost as surprising, and much more significant, was the endorsement of the 2.3–million–member International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
⁶³
Reagan had
been warmly received by the Teamsters back in August, but the endorsement was nonetheless unexpected.

Odd as the Teamsters' endorsement of Reagan seemed at the time, nothing nefarious—at least on the surface—was involved, according to Myron Mintz, a veteran of the Nixon White House and a tax attorney for the controversial union and its then president, Frank “Frankie” Fitzsimmons, a protégé of Jimmy Hoffa's. The union was angry with the Carter administration and Ted Kennedy for supporting deregulation of the trucking industry. The Teamsters had flirted with endorsing John Connally in the primaries, but Fitzsimmons's rival, Jackie Presser, later held a rally for Reagan in Ohio over the summer of 1980. Anxious not to be cut off from Reagan inside his own union, Fitzsimmons agreed to endorse Reagan; he did so at the urging of Mintz during a game of gin rummy with Mintz.
⁶⁴
Fitzsimmons, a lifelong Republican, wasn't that difficult to persuade. Presser needed to do more work with the board. He said: “You Italians, listen up! More than anyone else in this room, you should be supporting Reagan! Reagan has agreed to lay off of us! The Justice Department will not be on our backs for once!”
⁶⁵
He also told them that Reagan would not pursue trucking deregulation as aggressively as Carter had. They immediately voted to support Reagan.

Mintz, who grew up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Philadelphia, was well suited to be a union lawyer, a world in which allegations of mob ties were routine. He'd once gotten into a fistfight with government officials who had come to his office with a search warrant for union documents. A lifelong Jew, Mintz changed his religion to Baptist during his divorce proceedings with his first wife so he could get their children on Christian holidays. When the court awarded their unoccupied house to his former wife, he went there one Friday afternoon, put a garden hose in the basement window, turned on the water, and left.
⁶⁶

The welcomed union endorsements were mostly lost in a miniflap over Reagan's assertion that the EPA was too aggressive in pursuit of a clean environment. Reagan had gone off script, and he and his campaign ended up stuck in a debate with Carter's EPA and the media over what constituted air pollution and how it was created. The controversy reminded people of an earlier comment he had made to the effect that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles,” a statement for which he had been roundly denounced.
⁶⁷
Worse, Reagan tried to suggest that the spill of more than 200,000 gallons of oil off of Santa Barbara was no big deal. From an environmental standpoint he was right, for as Lou Cannon wrote in
Governor Reagan
, the “long-term biological effects of the spill were negligible.” But the political impact of the spill was “enormous,” as Cannon said; it gave force to the environmental movement and led to a ban on drilling in federal waters.
⁶⁸

Michele Davis confided in her diary, “Old RR came out with some real off-the-wall bloopers on the environment today.”
⁶⁹
Reagan opened himself up to attacks with such remarks. One environmental activist said Reagan had “a Neanderthal understanding” of the problems of the environment and the media whipsawed him over his comments.
⁷⁰
Reagan was tired and he needed to get off the road to recharge his batteries.

Adding to Reagan's embarrassment was a case of bad timing. On the heels of his assertion that air pollution was coming under control in America, two press planes following his campaign aircraft into Los Angeles had to be diverted because of poor visibility due to smog. Later, at a rally with Roy Rogers, he was met by environmental activists who heckled him, one carrying a sign that read, “Stop Pollution; Choke Reagan.”
⁷¹

C
ARTER'S NEWEST PROMISE TO
elevate the tone of his campaign lasted exactly twenty-four hours. On a swing through Florida, he said Reagan would not be “a good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.” Jody Powell was sent to the back of the plane to clean up Carter's mess. Reagan that day had said the hallmark of the Carter presidency was “a string of broken promises and trusts that have been betrayed.” Powell made the equivalency argument: “If one is a harsh personal attack, the other damn sure is.”
⁷²

Reagan might have been expected to receive sympathetic coverage in the wake of Carter's newest assault, but then he accused the president of plotting an “October Surprise,” the first time the candidate had used this phrase in public. Reagan simply let it be known that “presidents can make things happen.” Carter hotly denied that his administration was cooking up an October Surprise, but the Reagan campaign had injected the issue into the national debate, attempting to tap into voters' cynicism about Carter.
⁷³

Reagan went off message when he charged that Carter engaged in “fits of childish pique” and that he was the “greatest deceiver ever to occupy the White House.” Reagan added, “We trusted him and now as president he's broken probably more promises than any president in United States history.”
⁷⁴
Reagan was off his game, which was precisely what Pat Caddell had hoped to achieve with his attack strategy.
⁷⁵
Up to this point, though, Reagan had mostly avoided such attacks and spoken directly to the voters. “Keep in mind,” he said, “this dream is not so much for those who are already well-off as it is for … the great majority of Americans who are less fortunate—for the poor, for minority Americans and for the elderly.”
⁷⁶

Traveling through the Sunshine State, Reagan told elderly voters that he favored repealing a law which prohibited them from making outside income with
out reducing Social Security benefits. The limitations, dating back to the Depression, did not apply to government officials, known at the time as “double dippers.” Reagan told a crowd at Al Lopez Field in Tampa that he would work to preserve the oft-maligned retirement system.
⁷⁷
From Florida he headed back to California for a much-needed weekend of rest.

When he was on message, evident in Reagan's speeches and at his rallies, was a renewed appeal to American patriotism that had been out of fashion for years. The elites had made patriotic Americans a caricature, from Johnny Carson's dim-witted “Floyd R. Turbo” to comedian George Carlin's rants against traditional American values and the culture; and the counterculture had made anybody who wore an American flag lapel pin out to be some sort of Bozo. Many sports facilities simply stopped playing the national anthem. In a country where it was once impossible for a man in uniform to walk into a bar and not have someone buy him a beer, by the 1970s servicemen were sometimes spat upon. But Reagan spoke unabashedly about loving his country and old-fashioned values, and also about his hope for the future. One wag said it best about Reagan: he was nostalgic for the future.

The sophisticates who could rarely find anything good to say about America continued their derision of Reagan and patriotism. But it was they who had become a joke, not those who agreed with Reagan. Patriotism had become hip again, at least for the middle and lower classes.

Of all the unwritten stories of the 1980 campaign, one of the most significant was that the fever of anti-Americanism had run its course and Dr. Reagan was chiefly responsible for breaking it.

“
If the guy can't debate Jimmy Carter for one hour, maybe we're all making a mistake.
”

B
y mid-October the Reagan momentum had faltered once again, and the Democrats had the wind at their backs. In Texas, which Reagan should have put away long before, polling showed the race tied.
¹
Ernie Angelo, who was running Reagan's operations in the state, worried that with a large Hispanic turnout, Texas might go for Jimmy Carter again. He was working to get a healthy share of that vote for Reagan, but a pro-Carter Hispanic leader retorted, “If we wanted an actor, we would vote for Ricardo Montalban.”
²
Two former Democratic governors were supporting Reagan, Preston Smith and Allan Shivers
³
, but if anyone knew how to deliver the state to Reagan, it was the tall, lanky, soft-spoken, and well-regarded Angelo. He was up against a Carter import, Bob Beckel, a large, hard-drinking, garrulous gun-for-hire.